Ritorno!

My dear readers, it is with enormous pleasure and excitement and even a little bit of nervousness that I tell you that I'm here, I'm back, I finally feel ready to start writing again on this blog that has accompanied me for one and a half years of my life.
These past two months have seen big changes in my life. It has been a very hard and painful period for me, as I mentioned in the previous post. But such is life, in the end. One can never give anything for granted and must be able to adapt him/herself and welcome any change that occurs. During this time, I have discovered a lot of things about myself and the people around me. I found out that I have even more dear friends than I thought. I have talked about important things to so many wonderful people, and everybody has given me their viewpoint, a different take on life, a word of encouragement, a reason to understand that I should not be upset, or too sad. One should always look at the bright side of things, if at all possible. Retain the good memories, forgive and ask for forgiveness. Life goes on, and it's a wonderful adventure.

So said, I'm here, in a new amazing apartment, still in my beloved Berkeley, with more friends than ever, and a new wonderful housemate that you will probably get to know more in the future. I will hopefully be able to post pictures soon, so I don't want to give you any preview with words about how beautiful this new place is. You will see by yourself shortly!

In this first post of a new series, I want to take the occasion to thank also all of you, my blogger friends, who have been so close to me with your comments and emails. It was a pleasure to read them, and I now have a lot of catching up to do. The blogger friend I want to thank the most is Simona from Briciole. She has been with me throughout all this period and without her generosity my life would have been a lot more difficult. It's actually amazing to me to see how close friendships the blogsphere can create.

I'm still really busy with setting up my new place and trying to catch up with the pile of work accumulated, so I'll probably be able to post the 'Fresh Produce of the Month' roundup only next weekend. So far, I want to write here a few interesting things that are blog-related.

The first amazing news is that my blog was chosen to be one of the 'Excellent' blogs of the cyberspace! I'm SOOO happy about it! Thanks a lot Eskay!!! It really made me feel good to find out about it, when I saw it, even if I didn't write about it for such a long time.
And I get to choose three more food-bloggers to give this recognition too! I would like to pass it on to Simona at 'Briciole', Meeta at 'What's for lunch honey' (I cannot see the tag among the many others that she already has!!), and Amanda at Mrs. W's Kitchen.

After these news, there's another quite interesting blog-related thing that happened in the past few months. Do you remember the 'Death by chocolate' context that I entered with the 'Torinese style hot chocolate' post?
Well, my post wasn't selected, but amazingly enough, my friend Sonya who entered the competition as a voter won! And, guess who she chose to accompany her?? Me!!! So, I ended up going to Napa with her, and finding out the real meaning of 'Death by chocolate'! I must testify: it is an amazing show. Two floors filled with stands giving out chocolate of all possible types. Chocolate with salt and cayenne pepper, with turmeric, and of course all sorts of nuts covered with chocolate, pieces of chocolate produced in every part of the world, two chocolate fountains, one with dark and one with white chocolate, of the most delicious type.. I could have never imagined I would have been able to refuse a chocolate, but after a two hour tour there, I really couldn't eat more chocolates! So I ended up bringing home two boxes of them. :) Plus, there were stands with wonderful wine that was good to drink with chocolate (too bad I was driving..). So: if you and a friend of yours really love chocolate, and you want to offer yourself a one-in-a-lifetime experience, I'd recommend trying this. The ticket cost $45 a person, but you may be actually drinking and eating for a value that's higher than that... and if you win the tickets like my friend, then.. that's the best :)

This will end the first post of my new series before it gets too long. But there are a lot of other blog and not-blog related news I'll write about soon.. and new pictures and recipes to come. :)